Sơn Mỹ village, Sơn Tịnh district of South Vietnam, March 16, 1968. Photo/Wikicommons.

When Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and children in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four heroes who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to justice.

One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people. One was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the massacre, and began a private investigation, ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon and Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Charlie Company who witnessed the whole thing, and reported it all to Ridenhour. And one was journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in the US media.

Today’s war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties, or homes “suspected” of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten as the inevitable “collateral damage” of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a mistake–a massacre which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen innocent people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others, in Kunar Province, on Dec. 26.

Sadly, no principled soldier with a conscience like pilot Hugh Thompson tried to save these children. No observer had the guts of a Michael Brernhardt to report what he had seen. No Ron Ridenhour among the other serving US troops in Afghanistan has investigated this atrocity or reported it to Congress. And no American reporter has investigated this war crime the way Seymour Hersh investigated My Lai.

There is a Seymour Hersh for the Kunar massacre, but he’s a Brit. While American reporters like the anonymous journalistic drones who wrote CNN’s Dec. 29 report on the incident, took the Pentagon’s initial cover story–that the dead were part of a secret bomb-squad–at face value, Jerome Starkey, a dogged reporter in Afghanistan working for the Times of London and the Scotsman, talked to other sources–the dead boys’ headmaster, other townspeople, and Afghan government officials–and found out the real truth about a gruesome war crime–the execution of handcuffed children.

And while a few news outlets in the US like the New York Times did mention that there were some claims that the dead were children, not bomb-makers, none, including CNN, which had bought and run the Pentagon’s lies unquestioningly, bothered to print the news update when, on Feb. 24, the US military admitted that in fact the dead were innocent students. Nor has any US corporate news organization mentioned that the dead had been handcuffed when they were shot.

Starkey reported the US government’s damning admission. Yet still the US media remain silent as the grave.

Under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to execute a captive. Yet in Kunar on December 26, US-led forces, or perhaps US soldiers or contract mercenaries, cold-bloodedly executed eight hand-cuffed prisoners. It is a war crime to kill children under the age of 15, yet in this incident a boy of 11 and a boy of 12 were handcuffed as captured combatants and executed. Two others of the dead were 12 and a third was 15.

I called the Secretary of Defense’s office to ask if any investigation was underway into this crime or if one was planned, and was told I had to send a written request, which I did. To date, I have heard nothing. The Pentagon PR machine pretended to me on the phone that they didn’t even know what incident I was talking about, but without their “help” I have learned that what the US military has done–no surprise–is to pass the buck by leaving any investigation to the International Security Assistance Force–a fancy name for the US-led NATO force fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

It’s a clever ruse. The ISAF is no more a genuine coalition entity than was George Bush’s Iraq War Coalition of the Willing, but this dodge makes legislative investigation of the event impossible, since Congress has no authority to compel testimony from NATO or the ISAF as it would the Pentagon. A source at the Senate Armed Services Committee confirms that the ISAF is investigating, and that the committee has asked for a “briefing”–that means nothing would be under oath–once that investigation is complete, but don’t hold your breath or expect anything dramatic.

I also contacted the press office of the House Armed Services Committee to see if any hearings into this crime have been planned. The answer is no, though the press officer asked me to send her details of the incident (Not a good sign that House members and staff are paying much attention–the killings led to country-wide student demonstrations in Afghanistan, to a formal protest by the office of President Hamid Karzai, and to an investigation by the Afghan government, which concluded that innocent students had been handcuffed and executed, and no doubt contributed to a call by the Afghan government for prosecution and execution of American soldiers who kill Afghan civilians.)

There is still time for real heroes to stand up in the midst of this imperial adventure that may now appropriately be called Obama’s War in Afghanistan. Plenty of men and women in uniform in Afghanistan know that nine innocent Afghan children were captured and murdered at America’s hands last December in Kunar. There are also probably people who were involved in the planning or carrying out of this criminal operation who are sickened by what happened.

But these people are so far holding their tongues, whether out of fear, or out of simply not knowing where to turn (Note: If you have information you may contact me). There are also plenty of reporters in Afghanistan and in Washington who could be investigating this story. They are not. Don’t ask me why. They certainly should not be able to call themselves journalists–at least with a straight face.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

You had to love the headline the Philadelphia Inquirer put on the jump page of columnist Trudy Rubin’s Sunday commentary about word that the Obama administration is hoping to talk with at least some mid-level Taliban leaders about giving up the fight and “coming over” to the “government” side.

“Relax–No deal with Taliban is Imminent,” the headline read. “I suggest everyone take a deep breath,” Rubin wrote. “The US position toward talks with the Taliban has shifted somewhat, but no deal with top Taliban leaders is imminent, or even likely.”

Phew! Thank god for that! Imagine Americans actually sitting down and discussing peace just as we’re getting a good war on!

Fortunately, say Rubin and other journalists with good Washington connections (Rubin has for years been a big promoter of Gen. David Petraeus), America is only interested in talking with “low and mid-level Taliban” whom it hopes to “wean away” to our side with offers of jobs and money.

But really, what is the problem with actually negotiating with the real leaders?

It’s clear that this talk of limited talking with lower-level Taliban grunts is an act of desperation by a US side that recognizes that it is losing the war. The Taliban are not running from the fight as American forces ramp up with Obama’s escalation of troops and mercenaries. They are taking the battle to the US, with coordinated attacks right in Kabul, open firefights with US troops in the field, and increasingly brazen attacks all over the country.

The idea that the US doesn’t negotiate with its enemies is one of those stupid “We’re Number One!” mantras born of the World War II experience. There, the US and its allies refused to negotiate with the clearly defeated Axis powers. Germany was bombed into ruins and simply overrun by the US and its allies, including the Soviet Union marching from the east. Japan was not allowed to surrender. Its efforts to negotiate a settlement were brushed off by Washington so the US could vaporize two of Japan’s cities with its new A-bombs, firebomb Tokyo, and then accept a total surrender.

Since that time, total victory has been the model for American war making, except that of course there have been some big exceptions. The US ended up in a stalemate against North Korea and its ally China, and had to negotiate a cease-fire in place, which continues to this day. And of course in Vietnam, a war the US lost, it ended up having to negotiate its way out before its own forces were overrun.

The Afghanistan situation would appear to be closer to Vietnam than to Korea. There is no way the country can be divided up into a Taliban sphere and a US puppet-run sphere. First of all, the Taliban have the support of most of the Pashtun ethnic group, which is the largest by far in the country. Second, there is no “government” side–just a bunch of tribal groups and a US puppet regime–hugely corrupt and actually more of a mob than a government, that controls the capital of Kabul and a few other large towns.

The Taliban have already proven that they can defeat a foreign army–the Russians–who had more troops in their fight than the US will have even after Obama’s escalation is complete. And they know they are winning.

So it really isn’t in our interest to say we won’t talk with what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls “the really bad guys” in the Taliban.

Of course we’ll talk with them–eventually. We’ll have to, so we can extract our troops in an orderly fashion and claim to the American people that we have won “peace with honor.” The alternative would be to have to rush them out with the enemy hounding them as they leave, tail between legs.

Look for it. At some point, after enough young Americans have been killed or had their body parts blown off, after the country has spent one or two or three hundred billion dollars on the effort, after an increasingly frustrated military has cranked up the terrorizing and slaughter of innocent Afghanis as much as it can get away with, President Obama or whoever replaces him in the White House in 2012, will have to call for peace talks.

Then there will be the inevitable debate for months about the shape of the table, with the US insisting that one side be reserved for the puppet regime of Hamid Karzi, or whatever leader the CIA installs after Karzai is finally assassinated or maneuvered into exile in Switzerland–in order to preserve the illusion that there is an Afghan government side. And finally there will be the announcement of a power-sharing agreement, in which the Taliban will be given half the ministries, and Taliban forces will be merged into the national army.

The remaining US forces (our NATO “allies” will by this point be long gone) will then climb aboard their C-5 and C-17 transports and fly home and, after a brief respite, the Taliban will toss out the old puppet leadership and just take over control of the country.

What is so depressing about all this, is it could all be accomplished right now and would save both sides from suffering additional casualties.

In fact, it makes so much more sense to do it now. If the US were, at this point, to call for talks with “the bad guys” at the top of the Taliban, it could negotiate a deal that would include carrots in the form of aid and reconstruction that could indeed lure the Taliban away from any global terrorist organizations that might want to seek their allegiance and assistance. It might take a little doing–after all the US has been aggressively trying to kill these very leaders using its ubiquitous Predator drones, and many of them have lost close family members to those drone attacks.

But at least there would be the chance of reaching some accommodation that would allow Afghanistan to start to recover from its decades-long nightmare of war and occupation. More war and more killing would merely mean that when the Taliban finally do drive the US out, they will be further embittered, further radicalized, and further filled with vengeance.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

In the hope of making the list more readily accessible — and searchable — than it is through a poorly photocopied Pentagon document, I reproduce it as a separate web page here, with commentary on some the prisoners I have been able to identify. This is very much a work-in-progress, of course, as the state of knowledge regarding Bagram is akin to that regarding Guantánamo back in 2005, before the prisoner lists and 8,000 pages of documents were released that allowed me to research and write my book The Guantánamo Files, and to begin a new career as a full-time journalist on Guantánamo and related issues.

In an article accompanying this post, “Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List,” I examined what the list — which contains only the prisoners’ names, and not their nationalities or the date and place of their capture — revealed about the small number of foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries, three of whom are currently waiting to see if the Court of Appeals will overturn the right to habeas corpus that was granted to them by Judge John D. Bates last March, and raised questions about the whereabouts of other known “ghost prisoners” who do not appear to have been included on the list.

In an article to follow, I’ll examine how the list reveals not only that around 3,000 prisoners have been held at Bagram in the last six years, but also how the majority of the prisoners listed were seized in 2008 and 2009 — and I’ll examine what this means with regard to the US administration’s detention policies and the Geneva Conventions, which were discarded by George W. Bush and have clearly not been reintroduced by Barack Obama.

Although I believe that I have had some success tracking down the stories of some of the 100 or so prisoners on the list who have been held at Bagram for between three and seven years, I have found few clues as to the identities of the majority of those listed, who, as mentioned above, were seized in the last two years. Most reports — by the US military or the media — of raids or skirmishes that led to the capture of those held have not furnished the names of those seized, and on the rare occasion that names have been provided it has tended to be because they are regarded as significant figures.

I have no idea whether the allegations against these men are true, but, more importantly, I have not failed to notice that the majority of the prisoners (often men identified by only one name) are clearly not significant figures at all, and my fear — which, I have no doubt, will be confirmed when more information emerges — is that many of them will be revealed to be victims of the same chaotic approach to the capture of prisoners that has done so much to lose the battle for the “hearts and minds” of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq for the last eight years, and which, with regard to the 218 prisoners seized in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2003 and sent to Guantánamo, I chronicled in The Guantánamo Files.

One sign that this is indeed the case was reported on NPR last August, when NPR’s Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman explained how Maj. Gen. Doug Stone had recently been sent to Afghanistan by Gen. David Petraeus, the overall commander of Afghanistan and Iraq, because he “liked the way Stone revamped the detention centers in Iraq, how he changed them for the better.” Bowman explained that Stone “went to Afghanistan with a team, interviewed detainees, visited detention facilities,” and produced a 700-page report, in which he estimated that “as many as 400 of the 600 held at Bagram can be released,” explaining that “many of these men were swept up in raids” and “have little connection to the insurgency.”

Bowman added that Maj. Gen. Stone “wants to focus on rehabilitation, just like he did in Iraq where he ran the detention system there. He had 21,000 detainees. But he found that most of these Iraqi detainees — as many as two-thirds — were not radicals, but mostly illiterate and jobless young people. Some were innocents and others worked for the insurgency because they just needed the money. And Stone worried that detaining them was only making matters worse, actually turning them into radicals.”

As Stone explained to NPR at the time:

Now you’ve got a bunch of moderates who really shouldn’t be in there in the first place. And I can hold them forever, but eventually they’re going to say, “Why are you holding me? What’s the fairness in this?” And eventually they’ll say something about America that we don’t want to hear. They’re going to say, “Wait a minute, you’re not here to better the population, you’re here to conquer us and you’re taking me hostage.”

If you have any further information about any of the men on this list, please feel free to email me, and I will incorporate the information into the list.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

The Obama administration announced Sunday it will subject the citizens of 14 nations who are flying to the United States to intensified screening at airports, including being subjected to full-body pat downs or body scanners.

Under the new rules, all citizens of Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen must receive a pat down and an extra check of their carry-on bags before boarding a plane bound for the United States, officials said. Citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria — nations considered “state sponsors of terrorism” — face the same requirement.

In a statement, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), part of the giant Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said a majority of all other U.S.-bound international travelers — not just from the 14 countries — will also face random and threat-based enhanced screening.

But the agency denied that the new regulations amount to profiling. “TSA does not profile. As is always the case, TSA security measures are based on threat, not ethnic or religious background,” spokeswoman Kristin Lee said.

“We are only as strong as our weakest point,” said Cindy Farkus, the head of global security programs at the Transportation Security Administration. “We are always trying to stay ahead of where the emerging threats might be.”

But the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) told us that the new TSA guidelines were “a political solution to a security problem.” MPAC’s Communications Director, Edina Lekovic, urged the adoption of behavior-based screening rather than profiling, and called the TSA guidelines “a lazy solution that may make us feel good, but in fact merely creates blind spots that make us less safe.”

“These ‘blind spots’ can be identified and exploited by violent extremists. Furthermore, the new policy deeply undermines the Obama administration’s stated commitment to civil rights, equality before the law, and a much-needed effort to rebuild U.S.-Muslim world relations,” she added.

Lekovic also disclosed reports she has received from members of her constituency that TSA screeners at Washington DC’s Dulles airport have been instructed to carry out additional inspections of women wearing headscarves. These reports could not be immediately confirmed with the TSA.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the government should “adhere to longstanding standards of individualized suspicion and enact security measures that are the least threatening to civil liberties and are proven to be effective. Racial profiling and untargeted body scanning do not meet those criteria.”

“We should be focusing on evidence-based, targeted and narrowly tailored investigations based on individualized suspicion, which would be both more consistent with our values and more effective than diverting resources to a system of mass suspicion,” said Michael German, national security policy counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office and a former FBI agent.

“Overbroad policies such as racial profiling and invasive body scanning for all travelers not only violate our rights and values, they also waste valuable resources and divert attention from real threats.”

The organization said the government’s plan to subject citizens of certain countries to enhanced screenings is bad policy, because there is no way to predict the national origin of a terrorist and many terrorists have come from countries not on the list. It cited the case of the “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid, who was a British citizen, as were four of the London subway bombers.

“Singling out travelers from a few specified countries for enhanced screening is essentially a pretext for racial profiling, which is ineffective, unconstitutional and violates American values. Empirical studies of terrorists show there is no terrorist profile, and using a profile that doesn’t reflect this reality will only divert resources by having government agents target innocent people,” said German. “Profiling can also be counterproductive by undermining community support for government counterterrorism efforts and creating an injustice that terrorists can exploit to justify further acts of terrorism.”

Nihad Awad, national executive director for the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR), said in a statement, “Under these new guidelines, almost every American Muslim who travels to see family or friends or goes on pilgrimage to Mecca will automatically be singled out for special security checks — that’s profiling.”

He added, “Under these new guidelines, almost every American Muslim who travels to see family or friends or goes on pilgrimage to Mecca will automatically be singled out for special security checks -– that’s profiling. While singling out travelers based on religion and national origin may make some people feel safer, it only serves to alienate and stigmatize Muslims and does nothing to improve airline security.”

“We all support effective security measures that will protect the travelling public from an attack such as that attempted on Christmas Day,” Awad said. “But knee-jerk policies will not address this serious challenge to public safety.”

MPAC’s government liaison, Alejandro Beutel, said, “The new TSA guidelines deliver a propaganda victory to Al-Qaeda and other violent extremist groups, since they rob targeted groups of people from their civil liberties based on their ethnicity and country of origin,” said “Call it whatever you want, but this is religious and ethnic profiling at its worst.”

A number of legal experts were also critical of the new measures.

Georgetown University law professor David Cole said, “The danger with nationality-based profiling is that it sweeps up vast numbers of innocent people, may alienate those we need to have on our side if we are to reduce al-Qaeda recruitment, and takes our eyes off folks, like Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, who are citizens of other countries that don’t fit the profile.”

Richard Reid, a self-admitted member of Al Qaeda, was convicted by a U.S. federal court of attempting to destroy a commercial aircraft in-flight by detonating explosives hidden in his shoes in 2001. Moussaoui, a French citizen, was convicted of conspiring to kill citizens of the US as part of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In response to numerous calls for profiling from elected politicians, former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff told National Public Radio, “I’m going to argue that this case illustrates the danger and the foolishness of profiling…I think it’s not only problematic from a civil rights’ standpoint, but frankly, I think it winds up not being terribly effective.”

He cited a Justice Department 2003 advisory report that concluded, “Racial profiling in law enforcement is not merely wrong, but also ineffective. Race-based assumptions in law enforcement perpetuate negative racial stereotypes that are harmful to our rich and diverse democracy, and materially impair our efforts to maintain a fair and just society.”

A number of transportation security authorities have recommended that the U.S. adopt the screening practices used by Israel’s airports and airlines. El Al airlines, one of the world’s safest carriers, has spent many years developing screening methods based on passengers’ behavior, rather than looks, dress, or country of origin.

Consider the recent decision by US District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina tossing out the indictment of five Blackwater (now Xe) mercenaries for the 2007 slaughter of 14 innocent Iraqis in Baghdad.

The judge found that federal prosecutors had improperly used incriminating statements which he said had been “compelled” from the Blackwater personnel under “threat of job loss.”

Let’s compare that to how the courts have handled other cases. We might start with John Walker Lindh, the young American captured in the first days of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Indicted on charges of conspiring to kill Americans, Lindh, currently serving a 20-year sentence after a plea agreement reached with the government, never had his case thrown out, though the government’s main evidence was a statement allegedly made by him (this on the word of an FBI agent) that he had been a member of the Taliban and Al Qaeda–a statement that even if actually made, had come at a time that Lindh was being kept duct-taped to a gurney and held in an unheated, unlit metal shipping container, with an untreated bullet wound in his leg, and denied access to an attorney.

Surely the coercion behind this “confession”–Lindh’s military captors allegedly were threatening him that he would die in Afghanistan–was at least as severe as the threat to Blackwater guards that they could lose their jobs if they didn’t tell what had happened at the bloody shooting in Baghdad. Yet Lindh’s charges were allowed to stand.

Or compare the Blackwater case to the case of Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been on Pennsylvania’s death row now for 27 years for the 1981 killing of a white Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal was convicted largely on the basis of testimony by two alleged “eye-witnesses”: an African-American prostitute named Cynthia White and a white taxi driver named Robert Chobert.

White gave wildly different accounts of what she had “seen” from her position on the sidewalk several car lengths away from the shooting. In her first statement to police, on Dec. 9, 1981, the day of the shooting, she claimed the shooter of officer Faulkner had “fired the gun at the police officer four or five times” after which “the police officer fell to the ground, started screaming.” But after that initial interview, White kept being picked up again and again by police, who would bring her to homicide where she would be re-interviewed. Each time, her version of what she had seen would change, and the number of shots fired at the officer while he was standing would get lower, from “four or five shots” on Dec. 12, to “one or two shots” on Dec. 17, to just one shot on Jan. 8.

Asked at trial by Abu-Jamal’s attorney why her account of what she had seen kept changing, White replied, “They were asking me questions, and they asked me in a different way to explain it.” Was White being coerced by police investigators into making perjured testimony? White was a prostitute. Police kept arresting her on the street and asking her the same questions over and over. At least one fellow prostitute, Veronica Jones, later testified that she had been similarly pressured by police, with the offer allegedly being made that if she said what police investigators wanted, she would be left alone and would even be protected in her street-walking activity.

Chobert, meanwhile, the taxi driver, claimed to have been parked in his taxi behind Officer Faulkner’s squad car, when he witnessed the shooting two cars ahead of him. There has always been a question as to whether Chobert was really parked where he said he was. White, in two drawings of the scene done for police investigators, showed Faulkner’s car, Abu-Jamal’s brother’s car, and a Ford that was not involved in the incident at all, but she did not show any taxi. Nor did any other witness report seeing Chobert or his cab.

In any event, while Joseph McGill, the assistant DA prosecuting the case, assured the jury of Chobert’s integrity (“Do you think anybody could get him to say anything that wasn’t the truth?” he asked them rhetorically in his summation.), in fact, he had worked assiduously to prevent them from knowing that this witness actually was a convicted arsonist (he had thrown a molotov cocktail into an elementary school for money and was currently on out on probation for a five year sentence).

McGill also convinced the judge to keep from the jury the information that Chobert was driving his cab on a license that had been suspended for a DWI conviction–something that could have been used to revoke his probation and send him to jail to serve his term. Further, McGill failed to tell either the jury or the judge or the defense that Chobert had asked him if the prosecutor could help him “fix” his license problem. Clearly, Chobert was also testifying in this controversial case under considerable coercion.

Yet through years of appeals, though the evidence of coerced testimony is clear in this case, no judge has seen fit to toss out Abu-Jamal’s conviction and order a new trial.

Although it is clearly anathema to any kind of fair trial, coercion is commonplace in American “justice.” Whether a judge will decide that the coercion of confessions or of witnesses requires the tossing out of an indictment, or the overturning of a conviction, though, appears to have more to do with the political connections of the defendant than with the merits of the case.

John Walker Lindh was portrayed in the months before his trial as “the American Taliban” by no less than the Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft. He was widely portrayed in the media at the time as a traitor to America, though he had actually joined up with Taliban fighters in August of 2001, a month before the 9-11 attacks at a time that the US had no troops in Afghanistan, and was actually holding governmental meetings with the Taliban government over a pipeline deal, and over efforts to attack opium growing in the country.

Abu-Jamal, since the shooting of Officer Faulkner, has been the target of a nationwide campaign by the police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, to have him convicted and executed.

There is really no doubt that Blackwater “security guards” working for the US military and State Department, perhaps fearing they were under attack, went on a shooting rampage in a Baghdad intersection, mowing down 14 civilians, including women and children, and wounding many more. One of the group initially charged even confessed and is currently serving jail time for his actions.

But in the view of a federal judge, the fear on the part of his colleagues that they might lose their jobs if they didn’t tell investigators what had happened makes their initial confessions “coerced,” and since those statements were used by federal prosecutors as a basis for their indictment of the men, the indictment was flawed and had to be tossed out.

American justice at work.

The scales are not balanced.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Nineteen years ago, Americans packed theaters for “Dances with Wolves” in which Native Americans became the heroes, but the story was set in a previous century and the message understated.

The Na’vi people of “Avatar” are very explicitly Iraqis facing “shock and awe,” as well as Native Americans with bows and arrows on horseback.  The “bad guys” in the battle scenes are U.S. mercenaries, essentially the U.S. military, and the movie allows us to see them, very much as they are right now in 177 real nations around the world, through the eyes of their victims.

People know this going into the movie, and do not care. For better, and certainly for worse, they do not care.

Millions of people stand in lines, shell out big bucks, wear stupid-looking 3-D glasses, sit in the dark for three hours, identify with twelve-foot-high pointy-eared blue people, cheer as the credits roll, and simply do not care that actual human beings suffer the same fate as the computer-generated creations, albeit without miraculous happy endings.

Imagine if a tenth of the people who now sympathize with these bony blue beings were to take three hours to read a book or watch a movie about the people of Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen or Iran. Our real planet would then be a different world.

When I saw “Avatar” in a packed 3-D theater in Virginia, and the crowd cheered the closing shot, I shouted: “And get out of Iraq too!” No one cheered for that. But no one called me a traitor either.

But will anyone in that crowd lift a finger to pressure their representatives in Congress to stop funding the evil they’d just seen sanitized, animated, relocated, and ever so slightly disguised?

Rob Kall at OpEd News suggested that we make flyers to hand out at theaters following screenings of “Avatar.” Having now seen the film, I think he’s right. Here’s a flyer (PDF). Here’s the text:

AVATAR

Did you know that the Na’vi people are real, their troubles are real, and you can be a hero who saves them? It’s true!

The story of “Avatar” is the story of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries attacked and occupied by U.S. mercenaries and U.S. troops.

It’s harder to think about that, than it is to sympathize with giant blue computer-animated creatures. But it’s extremely important that you take the step to explicitly admit to yourself what you’ve just watched in this movie, and that you take the additional step of doing something about it.

You don’t have to ride a dragon or shoot an arrow, but you do have to call this number 202-224-3121 and ask to speak with your representative in the U.S. House of Representatives and tell them that their career will be over if they vote another dime to pay for the evil depicted in “Avatar.”

Tell them that investing your money in education, transportation, energy, or infrastructure produces many more jobs than investing it in killing. Tell them that diplomacy and aid work better than bombs, and that we do not need unobtainium, which is called that for a reason, although we know it as “oil”.

Call every day until you get the right answer, and report your daily progress at defundwar.org

David Swanson is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town by visiting davidswanson.org/book.

Malek Hadi was working with the U.S. military police when a homemade bomb detonated beneath his Humvee in September 2006. It cost him his right leg and several fingers. Documents show AIG insurance withheld his disability benefits in an effort to force him to accept a lump-sum settlement. Left: Hadi in Baghdad. Right: Hadi in his Arlington, Texas, apartment (Allison V. Smith/For The Los Angeles Times.)

This report was written by ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller and co-published with the Los Angeles Times.

After the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the U.S. military discovered that rebuilding the country and confronting an insurgency required a weapon not in its arsenal: Thousands of translators.

To fill the gap, the Pentagon turned to Titan Corp., a San Diego defense contractor, which eventually hired more than 8,000 interpreters, most of them Iraqis.

For $12,000 a year, these civilians served as the voice of America’s military, braving sniper fire and roadside bombs. Insurgents branded them collaborators and targeted them for torture and assassination. Many received military honors for their heroism.

At least 360 interpreters employed by Titan or its successor company were killed between March 2003 and March 2008, and more than 1,200 were injured. The death toll was greater than that suffered by the armed forces of any country in the American-led coalition, other than the U.S. Scores of translators assisting U.S. forces in Afghanistan have also been killed or wounded.

An insurance program funded by American taxpayers was supposed to provide a safety net for interpreters and their families in the event of injury or death. Yet for many, the benefits have fallen painfully short of what was promised, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica found.

Interviews, corporate documents and data on insurance claims show that:

• Insurers have delayed or denied claims for disability payments and death benefits, citing a lack of police reports or other documentary evidence that interpreters’ injuries or deaths were related to their work for the military. Critics, including some U.S. Army officers, say it is absurd to expect Iraqis or Afghans to be able to document the cause of injuries suffered in a war zone.
• Iraqi interpreters sent to neighboring Jordan for medical treatment say they were pressured to accept lump-sum settlements from insurers, rather than a stream of lifetime benefits potentially worth more, and were told that if they didn’t sign, they would be sent back to Iraq — a likely death sentence.
• Interpreters who have immigrated to America as refugees have ended up penniless, on food stamps or in menial jobs because their benefits under the U.S. insurance program are based on wages and living costs in their home countries, not in the United States. Payments intended to provide a decent standard of living in Iraq or Afghanistan leave the recipients below the poverty level in this country.

Malek Hadi was working with U.S. military police outside Baghdad when a homemade explosive detonated beneath his Humvee in September 2006. The blast tore off his right leg, mangled his left and sheared off several fingers.

Today, Hadi, 25, lives alone in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Arlington, Texas. He struggles to climb the stairs to his second-floor apartment on crutches. He has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder but is not receiving treatment because his insurer has refused to pay for it.

He lives on $612 a month in disability payments –- the maximum available under the war-zone insurance system.

“When we were in Iraq, we were exactly like the soldiers,” Hadi said. “Why are we treated differently now?”

Retired Army Col. Joel Armstrong, who served in Iraq and was a leading proponent of the 2007 U.S. troop buildup, or “surge,” that helped reduce violence in the country, said Iraqi interpreters were crucial to the strategy’s success.

“Without them, you really can’t operate effectively as a force. It’s just impossible,” Armstrong said. It is deplorable, he added, that interpreters injured while assisting American troops have had to fight for benefits.

“Every American should feel terrible about it,” he said. “It’s a shame.”

American International Group Inc. (AIG), the principal provider of insurance coverage for interpreters in Iraq, declined to answer detailed questions on its policies or comment on specific cases.

Marie Ali, a spokeswoman for the AIG unit that sold the coverage, said the company “is committed to handling every claim professionally, ethically and fairly. In all cases, it is our policy to respect the privacy of our customers and claimants and not discuss the specifics of individual claims.”

Under a World War II-era law known as the Defense Base Act, companies working under contract for the U.S. military must provide workers’ compensation insurance for their employees, both Americans and foreign nationals. The cost of the coverage is built into Pentagon contracts and so is ultimately paid by taxpayers.

The insurance system, administered by the U.S. Department of Labor, once handled a few hundred claims a year. It expanded dramatically after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq because of the Pentagon’s heavy reliance on civilian contract workers to drive fuel trucks, cook meals and provide other support services.

Today, there are more civilian workers than uniformed soldiers in the two battle zones, and more than 1,400 contract workers have died.

Interpreters in Iraq were covered by insurance purchased by their employer, first Titan Corp. and later L-3 Communications, a New York defense contractor that acquired Titan in 2005. L-3 paid AIG more than $20 million a year in premiums, according to corporate records.

Once a worker files an injury claim, the employer’s insurer must begin paying benefits within two weeks or file a “notice of dispute.”

Interpreters who suffered the worst injuries, such as loss of a limb or severe brain damage, typically received compensation relatively quickly. That is because they were treated at U.S. military facilities in Iraq, where staff members documented their injuries.

In other cases, AIG often had difficulty establishing to its satisfaction that interpreters’ injuries or deaths were work-related. The company routinely filed notices of dispute while it investigated the claims.

“Even determining the facts of an accident – the location and the circumstances – can be a challenge,” Charles Schader, AIG’s president of worldwide claims, told a Congressional panel in June. “Without sufficient information, examiners cannot make timely final determinations within 14 days.”

To pay death benefits, AIG required police reports or other supporting documents, according to former L-3 officials. Internal L-3 records from 2005 show that AIG examiners sent to Iraq were able to find documentation deemed necessary for benefits in only half the cases examined.

“If you’re missing one piece of documentation, you got denied,” said Colleen Driscoll, former chief claims manager for L-3. “These guys get murdered coming and going to work, and AIG turns them down because they don’t have a letter from the insurgents.”

Driscoll, a former U.N. refugee official, left L-3 in 2007. She said the cause was a dispute with company executives over treatment of injured interpreters.

She and another former L-3 official, Jennifer Armstrong, said their experience suggested that 10 percent to 20 percent of the company’s Iraqi workers who should have received benefits were denied.

Armstrong said that in one instance, a slain interpreter’s widow and children had to live for months in the company’s compound in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad while they waited for death benefits to be approved. It was too dangerous for them to remain in their home, and they could not afford to relocate, she said.

“The Iraqis were looked at as second-class citizens,” said Armstrong, who now works for another defense contractor. “It just became a business. When it became a business, you lost sight of the goal.”

L-3 did not respond to requests for comment.

AIG arranged for many of the most severely wounded Iraqis to be transferred to neighboring Jordan, where medical facilities were better and interpreters did not face the risk of assassination.

Emad Hatabah, a Syrian-trained physician who had been medical director of AIG’s Jordanian subsidiary, exercised broad authority over their care. A medical evacuation company that Hatabah owned transported interpreters from the war zone. He selected their doctors and arranged stays at hotels and rehabilitation clinics.

Once their treatment was concluded, Hatabah presented interpreters with settlement agreements providing for lump-sum payments, in return for which AIG would be released from further liability.

Several Iraqis said Hatabah pressed them to sign and told them that if they refused, they would be sent back to Iraq. In spring 2007, more than a dozen interpreters sent L-3 officials a petition complaining of “bad treatment” by Hatabah and asserting that he had threatened to have them deported.

One of the interpreters, Ali Kanaan, suffered vision damage and burns to more than a third of his body as a result of a 2006 suicide bombing.

Kanaan said Hatabah offered him a $61,000 settlement on AIG’s behalf. He said that when he resisted, Hatabah told him that if he didn’t accept the lump sum, he would have to return to Iraq to pursue a claim for disability benefits.

Kanaan decided to take the offer.

“If you obey Dr. Emad’s rules, you’ll be fine,” he said. “If you don’t, you got kicked out.”

Kanaan later immigrated to the U.S. as a refugee. Now 23, he works 12 hours a day in a cigarette store in Denver. At night, he cleans the stove hoods in restaurant kitchens. The caustic chemicals irritate his skin grafts, he said.

Hatabah, interviewed in Amman, the Jordanian capital, said the interpreters received exemplary care. He denied pressuring any of them to sign settlements or threatening to send them back to Iraq.

Hatabah said AIG’s office in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, sent him settlement agreements and his only role was to witness the signing of the documents. He said that because he is employed by AIG, he took care never to act as the treating physician for any interpreters, in order to eliminate even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

“I believe we did more than a good job,” Hatabah said. “It was a perfect job.”

Interpreters and other injured workers can appeal insurers’ denials through a dispute-resolution system in the Department of Labor. Ultimately, an administrative law judge decides the matter. The department must approve all settlements, and officials are supposed to review offers with the affected workers to make sure compensation is “adequate.”

“The whole purpose is to recognize that a guy who’s never had a $100,000 check in his life before is a sucker for a bad deal,” said Joshua Gillelan, a former lawyer for the department who now represents civilian workers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But few Iraqis know they have rights in the system, and interpreters interviewed for this report said the Labor Department never contacted them about settlement offers.

“Nobody called me or told me or did anything for me,” said Nazar Taei, 40, whose legs were riddled with shrapnel during a mortar attack in 2006.

After he arrived in the U.S. as a refugee, AIG offered Taei an $18,500 settlement, he said. He was dissatisfied with the amount, but accepted it.

“I told AIG, ‘Is this enough for somebody to start his life, who lost his job, a part of his life?’” recalled Taei, a Denver resident who recently enlisted in the U.S. Army and hopes to become a translator. “They said, ‘Those are the rules. We can’t do anything for you.’”

In at least one case, an AIG representative discouraged Iraqis from reaching out to the Labor Department. In an e-mail exchange last year, the father of an L-3 interpreter killed in a car bomb wrote to AIG, seeking to speed payment of death benefits.

The father, who revealed details of the case on condition of anonymity, asked an AIG examiner in Dubai about contacting Labor officials.

“I wouldn’t advice you to do so,” the examiner replied by e-mail. “You would be taking the full responsibility of the outcomes.”

Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis declined requests for an interview. In a statement, the Labor Department said the increase in civilian contract workers in Iraq and Afghanistan has posed formidable challenges for the war-zone insurance system. The department has no employees posted in Iraq, Afghanistan or surrounding countries, nor any speakers of Arabic or Afghan dialects.

The statement said Labor depends on insurers and defense contractors to inform workers of their rights and to report injuries.

“There is no way to accurately monitor compliance as the many levels of subcontracting to workers from around the globe makes such oversight impossible,” the statement said. “We understand and are concerned about the fact that we are unable to place staff at the front lines to ensure that all workers understand their rights.”

After the homemade explosive blew off his leg in 2006, Malek Hadi was sent to Jordan for treatment. There, AIG offered him a $60,000 lump-sum settlement, he said.

Hadi rejected the offer and said he was deported to Iraq within a month.

He later returned to Jordan as a refugee. He had applied for disability benefits but was not receiving any, and he could not get an explanation from AIG, he said. He lived on handouts from family and friends while waiting for permission to immigrate to the U.S.

Internal AIG documents indicate that a claims examiner withheld Hadi’s benefits in an effort to force him to accept the lump sum. Hadi was “clearly entitled” to benefits, a different AIG examiner wrote in a memo dated August 2008. The company had not paid because the previous examiner “was trying to get the claimant to decide whether to settle his claim,” the memo said.

After arriving in the U.S., Hadi again contacted AIG, this time seeking medical treatment as well as disability payments. A psychologist working with a refugee agency in Texas had diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. In addition, Hadi’s prosthetic right leg was causing sharp pains and his damaged left leg ached constantly.

AIG formally contested the claim, saying that he needed further medical evaluation. This past summer, more than three years after Hadi’s leg was blown off, AIG began paying him disability benefits of $612 a month. The insurer still has not approved his request for medical treatment.

Hadi spends most of his days in his apartment in Arlington, Texas, watching Arabic television and texting friends back home. “I lost my leg. My life is broken,” he said. “For what?”

A favorite possession is a gold coin given to him by a member of the 89th Military Police Brigade after he was injured.

“Proven in Battle,” it says.

The Iraq war inquiry has insisted that Tony Blair will be questioned “very much in public.”

The statement follows claims that key evidence from the former Prime Minister would be heard behind closed doors.

Newspaper reports claimed Mr Blair’s meetings with US President George W. Bush and details of the decision-making process that led to war would be dealt with in secret on grounds of national security and the need to protect Britain’s relationship with the US.

However, a spokesman for the Chilcot Inquiry said: “Mr Blair will be appearing very much in public and will be questioned in detail on a wide range of issues surrounding Britain’s involvement in Iraq.

“We have said right from the start that he will be a key figure in the inquiry. Mr Blair has said that he is ready and willing to give evidence in public.”

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy Phillip Carter.

Last week, lawyer, ex-Army Captain and Iraq veteran Phillip Carter, described by Glenn Greenwald as “a very harsh critic of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies,” suddenly resigned his post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy, which he had occupied since April. Carter claimed that he was leaving due to “personal issues,” which may be true, but as Greenwald noted, “the policies Obama has adopted in the last six months in the very areas of Carter’s responsibilities were ones Carter vehemently condemned when implemented by Bush.”

Greenwald then proceeded to explain how, in May 2008, Carter had condemned the Bush administration’s Military Commissions (the trial system for Guantánamo prisoners) as “fundamentally and fatally flawed,” arguing that “the rule of law will prevail only if they are perpetually blocked,” and cited a trial in a “civilian court” (his emphasis) of accused terrorists in France that involved “a combination of open and sealed (i.e., classified) evidence to prove the defendants’ guilt in a six-day trial,” which he regarded as the only viable model for the United States to follow.

How disappointing, then, that, just a month after Carter joined the Obama administration, the President announced, in a major national security speech, that the Commissions were back on the table, and Carter then watched, two weeks ago, as Attorney General Eric Holder announced that, although Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks would face a federal court trial in New York, five other prisoners — previously charged in the Bush administration’s Military Commissions — would face what is apparently a second tier of justice based solely on the government’s belief that their cases are weaker: trials in the revamped Military Commissions, which have been brought back from the dead with the help of Congress.

Greenwald also noted that, in another post in April 2008, Carter expressed dismay at the Bush administration’s decision to charge Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a “high-value detainee” held for over two years in secret CIA prisons before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006, in a Military Commission “for acts committed before Sept. 11 — to wit, his alleged participation in the bombing of the US Embassy in Tanzania [in 1998].” Carter focused on the following passage in a Washington Post report: “Almost all of his alleged ‘war crimes’ occurred before the Sept. 11 attacks, and most predated the nation’s fight against terrorism. Four co-conspirators in the Tanzania bombing were convicted in US federal courts. Ghailani, too, was indicted in the United States, but federal authorities have opted to try him before the commission, composed entirely of military officers.”

Rounding on the Bush administration, Carter stated:

I’ll be very interested to see how the Bush administration’s lawyers argue their way around the provision of Article 1 that reads, “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed”. Setting aside the myriad objections to the military commissions generally, and this case specifically, I think this is going to present a major hurdle for the government.

I’m also concerned about the deliberate decision to take this case away from federal prosecutors … In my opinion, our default choice for the prosecution of suspected terrorists should be federal court … The substantive and procedural due process granted by federal courts has strategic value — it confers legitimacy on the outcome. That legitimacy matters for the struggle against terrorism, and I think it’s crucial that we evaluate our prosecutorial decisions with that strategic calculus in mind.

As Greenwald noted, bringing the story up to date:

While the Obama administration commendably sent Ghailani to New York to be tried in a civilian court, it just announced two weeks ago that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, whose case originated as a criminal investigation with the FBI, would now be turned over to a military commission for prosecution in connection with the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole — raising all of the serious objections Carter voiced to the Ghailani case.

There’s more to Greenwald’s article — regarding Carter’s opposition to the use of the “state secrets” privilege, his concerns regarding the distinction between conventional wars of the past and the “War on Terror” when claiming presidential power, and his willingness to prosecute Bush administration officials and lawyers for war crimes, all of which have also been ignored by President Obama — but I’d like now to move onto the second departure from the administration: that of Greg Craig, the former White House Counsel, who resigned on November 13.

Craig is no darling of the left, as is apparent from complaints about his business dealings, including his relationship with Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s former Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff. However, on national security issues, his departure set the seal on the demise of a period of principled optimism that marked the first few months of the Obama administration, and that has degenerated into chaos and confusion ever since. A former foreign policy advisor to Senator Edward Kennedy and to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who served as special counsel in the White House of President Bill Clinton, and directed the team that defended Clinton against impeachment, Craig not only brought a wealth of political experience to Barack Obama’s administration, but was also the main driver of the policies designed to overturn and repudiate the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies in the “War on Terror.”

As Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf explained two weeks ago in an article in Time, “The Fall of Greg Craig,” Barack Obama “tasked Craig with dismantling Bush’s interrogation and detention policies” just four days after the Presidential election, and he took to his new job with extraordinary vigor, “creating one of the largest White House counsel’s offices ever, with dozens of high-powered lawyers, compared with only a handful who served under Bush in early 2001 … Craig’s office was an instant power center in the White House, able to produce answers, memos and ideas seemingly overnight while other parts of the Administration were still getting up and running.”

Despite opposition from the intelligence agencies, Craig drafted the Executive Orders, issued on President Obama’s second day in office, which, singlehandedly, sent a message to the world that the extra-legal horrors of the Bush administration had apparently come to an end. The orders set a one-year deadline for the closure of Guantánamo and called time on the CIA’s use of torture and secret prisons, and President Obama also announced that he was suspending the Military Commissions. Human rights activists were overjoyed, and, as Time noted, “Craig was delivering much of the change Obama had promised during the campaign.”

On March 15, Craig’s insistence on repudiating the Bush administration’s policies and providing the transparent government that Barack Obama had promised was delivered to full effect when, as a result of a long-standing court case initiated by the ACLU, a court deadline was reached regarding the release of classified memos, issued in 2002 and 2005 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which purported to justify the use of torture. When Craig notified the President that the Justice Department planned to make the memos public three days later, Obama asked for a one-month extension to consider his options.

According to Time, when Gen. Michael Hayden, the former Director of the CIA, learned of the administration’s intention to release the memos, he “went ballistic,” calling Craig on March 18 and asking him, “What are you doing?” Hayden claimed that, if Obama released the memos, “al-Qaeda would be able to train its warriors to resist the techniques described in their contents.” Craig was apparently unperturbed. “The President is never going to authorize any of those techniques,” he replied, prompting the following response from Hayden: “Lemme get this right. There are no conditions of threat this nation might face that would prompt you to interrupt the sleep cycle of somebody who may have lifesaving information?” As Time described it, “There was a long silence. Craig would not concede the point.”

This showdown may well have been the high point of Greg Craig’s endeavors to reset America’s moral compass, confirming the President’s commitment to non-abusive interrogation techniques, in the face of Hayden’s extraordinary insistence that sleep deprivation — a clear component of the torture techniques favored by the Bush administration — ought to continue to be part of the agency’s operations.

As Time explained, Hayden refused to back down, and rallied CIA opposition to Craig’s plans. Former Director George Tenet called his former aide John Brennan, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and John Deutch, a CIA Director under President Clinton, called Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon. National Security Council aide Denis McDonough, a former Senate staffer who has “daily access to the President,” was also recruited, and on April 15, as the court’s extension came to an end, Obama “invited eight officers of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center to make their case against release” at a meeting in the Oval Office. That evening, Obama called Rahm Emanuel, his Chief of Staff, to discuss the memos, and discovered that Emanuel was already discussing it “with about a dozen national-security and political advisers.” After joining the meeting, Obama “asked each to state a position and then convened an impromptu debate, selecting Craig and McDonough to argue opposing sides.”

As Time explained, “Craig deployed one of Obama’s own moral arguments: that releasing the memos ‘was consistent with taking a high road’ and was ‘sensitive to our values and our traditions as well as the rule of law.’ Obama paused, then decided in favor of Craig, dictating a detailed statement explaining his position that would be released the next day.”

What happened next signaled the start of the Obama administration’s retreat from the moral high ground, which led to the sidelining of Craig, and, finally, his resignation. Former Vice President Dick Cheney went on the attack, pollsters noted a drop in Obama’s support among independents, and, as a result, Rahm Emanuel “quietly delegated his aides to get more deeply involved in the process.”

Craig, however, remained focused on how to close Guantánamo, as he was, according to Time, “under pressure to eliminate … indefinite detention without charge or trial and the use of military commissions.” On April 17, he assembled officials from a range of government departments, and explained his plan: to bring some prisoners from Guantánamo to the US to face federal court trials, and also to bring others to settle in the United States. The latter were the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province whose release into the United States had been ordered in October 2008 by Judge Ricardo Urbina, after the Bush administration declined to challenge their habeas corpus petitions.

Craig, like Judge Urbina, recognized that, because they could not be repatriated (because of fears that the Chinese government would torture them), because no other country could be found that would take them, and because their continued imprisonment in Guantánamo was unconstitutional, they would have to be brought to the United States. According to Time, defense secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other senior officials “approved Craig’s plan to release two Uighurs in northern Virginia” as part of “a global game to empty the prison. If the two settled without incident, six more would be let into the US. That in turn would help the State Department persuade other countries to take Gitmo detainees. The hope was that those remaining could be tried in federal courts.”

At the meeting on April 17, security measures were planned for monitoring the Uighurs in their new home, and Craig also called for the development of “a plan to convince Congress and the public that it was a good idea.” The Uighurs’ lawyers had apparently agreed that their clients could be tagged, to play down security fears, and a Defense Department official told Time that the planned arrival of the Uighurs in the US “was a matter of days, not weeks.”

It was a fine and principled plan, and, had it happened, it would, I believe, have made the closure of Guantánamo by January 2010 possible. However, what happened instead is that another Cheney-baiting court case, concerning the release of photos showing the abuse of prisoners by US forces, reared up to derail the administration. On April 16, Craig had explained that the photos would have to be released, and at that point Robert Gates was supportive, and Rahm Emanuel was only concerned about locating a good time to release the information to cause minimal damage. A week later, however, when the government announced its plans to release the photos, senior military figures warned that soldiers in the field would face reprisals, Gates flip-flopped, and Republicans seized on another opportunity to attack the administration.

The uproar over the photos was then revived on April 24, when news of the Uighur resettlement plan was leaked. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell “launched three weeks of near daily attacks on the idea of letting the Uighurs loose in the US,” and although Dick Durbin, a staunch supporter of Obama and the Majority Whip in the Senate, thought the government could win the fight in Congress, cowardice finally prevailed.

By May 8, when Craig was summoned to a meeting with Obama, the tide had turned. “I don’t like my options,” the President said, in relation to the abuse photos, and although Craig explained that his legal team had found no alternative to releasing the photos, Obama directed him to find a way, which he did, by withdrawing approval and paving the way for a legal struggle that reached the Supreme Court this fall. In a one-line ruling on November 30, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling that the pictures be released, citing a provision in the Homeland Security funding bill signed into law on October 28, which authorized the Pentagon to block the release of the pictures, as well as any others which might “endanger” US soldiers or civilians.

Objectively, the refusal to release the photos in May was a distressing volte-face on the part of the administration, but behind the scenes it is now clear that the combined Republican assaults on Obama’s national security credentials led the administration to withdraw completely from Craig’s principled position regarding the Bush administration’s detention policies, compromising on issues that, as Craig had astutely recognized, were not open to compromise or negotiation if they were to succeed in overturning the Bush administration’s toxic legacy.

By the second week of May, Obama had killed the Uighur plan. As Time described it, “Craig never got a chance to argue the case to the President,” and an aide explained, “It was a political decision, to put it bluntly.” Thereafter, Craig was sidelined. The administration failed to fight back when Congress rose up in revolt, threatening to impose its own ban on the release of the photos, withholding funding for the closure of Guantánamo, legislating to prevent prisoners being brought to the US mainland, and interfering in the transfer of prisoners to any other country.

On May 21, Craig, like Phillip Carter, was obliged to watch as President Obama delivered the national security speech in which he not only announced his intention to revive the Military Commissions, but also — presumably to the absolute horror of Craig and Carter — explained that he would continue to hold some prisoners without charge or trial; those who, as he put it, “cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.” By doing so, Obama ignored the sub-text that, if you cannot prosecute someone, it is because the information you are using does not rise to the level of evidence, or is otherwise tainted by torture, and is therefore inherently unreliable.

Six months on, as Greg Craig finally tendered his resignation, the price of subscribing to the Bush administration handbook, instead of standing up to bullying lawmakers and a renegade ex-Vice President, has become distressingly clear.

When it comes to finding new homes for cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated, the administration finally managed to dispose of ten of the Uighurs, in Bermuda and Palau, although seven still remain at Guantánamo, nearly 14 months after Judge Urbina ordered their release, and dozens of other cleared prisoners face indefinite detention at the US government’s pleasure, because other countries — unenthused by Obama’s inability to bring even a single man to settle on the US mainland — have not rallied sufficiently to the cause.

Moreover, although the administration finally announced federal court trials for the five men accused of involvement with the 9/11 attacks on November 13 (the same day that Greg Craig resigned), Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder not only had to fight back against a wave of Republican fearmongering that has only grown in strength throughout the year, but also lost whatever credibility this should have given them — in the eyes of those whose allegiance is to the rule of law — by announcing that five others would face trials by Military Commission. They also conceded that Guantánamo would not close by January 2010, and let slip that some of those still held — those described by Obama in May as prisoners who “cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people” — would likely remain imprisoned forever without charge or trial.

Forgive me if I have oversimplified matters, but it appears to me that the failure to deliver a single, coherent system of justice to the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo, the failure to close the prison by Greg Craig’s deadline, the failure to kill the Military Commissions once and for all, and the acceptance, rather than the elimination of indefinite detention without charge or trial (which is at the very heart of the Guantánamo regime established by George W. Bush) demonstrate what happens when tough battles on points of principle give way to cowardice and political maneuvering, as exemplified in the poisonous compromises embraced six months ago by the Obama administration.

This report was originally published at the Future for Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

In an unprecedented town hall in Shanghai, the President takes questions on the most pivotal issues in U.S.-China relations directly from students and via the internet. Photo: White House photographer Pete Souza

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian style control over information.

Let’s just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000 tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and concrete bunker walls.

It has refused to disclose where the weapons were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that would show if they have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and otherwise undermine those military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge (this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).

But censorship in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at government-directed control of information. In America, some of the most potent censorship is done by the privately owned media—supposedly a bastion of freedom of expression.

There is no reason why the US media cannot report on depleted uranium and its deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American military bases from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just recently, stories have appeared both on Britain’s SkyTV and in the Guardian newspaper, reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects and infant cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities like Basra, Najaf, Baghdad and Samara—all urban areas where there were major assaults by US forces both in the initial invasion, when most of the DU weapons were used, and later during fights against holed-up insurgent groups.

In Fallujah, the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a staggering 15 times normal—an increase of 1400%!  While the article doesn’t mention depleted uranium specifically,  and says that doctors in Fallujah have been reluctant to attribute the astonishing number of birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US forces in late 2004, they do cite “radiation and chemicals” which were dumped on the city.

There is no such report about this in the US media.

Is that censorship?  Of course it is.

The American government doesn’t tell CBS News or CNN not to report this story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least generally), contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington Post and say, “Don’t report on the infant mortality crisis in Iraq, or on the possible connection to US weaponry.” The editors of those news organizations themselves simply decide that either the story is of no importance to readers or they worry that they may be criticized either by the government or by other media organizations for being unpatriotic, or biased.

The end result of such a process, however, is that the American public is as ignorant about certain things as someone in China.

More ignorant in fact.

One thing I learned from living and working as a journalist and journalism teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese people, with their long experience of living in a totalitarian dictatorship in which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the state and the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are being lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them. Accordingly, they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up subtle hints in news articles which honest journalists have learned how to slip into their carefully controlled reports. They have also developed a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting called xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, “back-alley news.”

This system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends. As telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet, which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become known as China’s “Great Firewall”—effectively all of China is like a vast corporate “intranet” which blocks access to outside websites—still allows the flow of email. This is nearly impossible to monitor, particularly when the messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of addressees.

So in China, reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes, or of important news about the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay, manage to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship apparatus.

It works because the Chinese people know they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and they want to break through that official shroud of secrecy and control.

In the US, in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is blissfully unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored, filtered and controlled.  We boast of our “free press,” and our open society, and indeed, as a journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.

But given that most people get their news either from corporately owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations,  it doesn’t really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment write because it won’t appear in the corporate media.  Since most Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a society with a free press and no censorship or control of information, they don’t even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed to them by corporate media sources.

The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites. Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information you could want is available, but you have to be first of all aware that you aren’t getting certain information via the obvious sources, and then you have to want to get it, and make the effort to find it.  For most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.

The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond just the use of nasty weapons.

Do Americans know that all the other modern western Democracies in the world have some form of national health care—either a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or Switzerland—and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.

Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of living in the world—or even close? No. Because the American media continue to portray the US as “number one.”

Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA? No. This important bit of information doesn’t get mentioned in the US media, which always starts the organization’s history at 1988, when it got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and children that our beloved soldier “heroes” are conducting in Iraq and Afghanistan in our name.

No censorship in America?

Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don’t insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net